Andy Dyer, Ph.DPlant Ecologist, University of South CarolinaAuthor, Chasing the Red Queen

What is the best way to raise the resistance?

This from Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass

“Well, in our country,” said Alice, still panting a little, “you’d generally get to somewhere else – if you can run very fast for a long time, as we’ve been doing.”“A slow sort of country!” said the Queen. “Now, here, you see, it takes all of the running you can do to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!”

To shift metaphors, as does plant ecologist Andy Dyer in his book Chasing the Red Queen, consider the fox and the hare....

The fox wants to catch a rabbit and eat it. Not wanting to be eaten, the rabbits runs for it. The rabbits that can’t run fast enough, are caught and eaten, and that’s the end of slow rabbits. But now foxes must run faster to catch fast rabbits, and if they can’t, that will be the end of slow foxes.

The race is on to eat or be eaten, and being in the race, as we all are, means we all have to run twice as fast just to stay in the same place. And so, to stay in the race as long as possible, we ask...